The article's proposed mapping of tags and especially comments to links strikes me as unavoidably clunky in a world where one-way links are the only kind available.
Maybe I'd find this golden hammer argument more convincing in the context of a hypertext system where bi-directional links [1] were common and well supported.
> In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down.
This is unsurprising and probably obvious. The purpose of the exercise is learning how to do experiments reliably so that at some later point when doing experiments to test a hypothesis you can have some confidence that the results you produce are actual data and not just noise.
When doing science class "experiments" of this sort perhaps it would illuminate things to students better by going up one level: the hypothesis under test is "student can perform experiment reliably". The putative subject of the "experiment" isn't the actual subject in inquiry: you are. On the other hand maybe this would just confuse students. (I've observed wildly varying capacity for abstraction and meta-cognition among the people I work with as a software developer so I suppose this is something that varies among individuals generally.)
Back in the day™ Think’s Pascal used bold, italics and underlining to do syntax highlighting because the Mac’s screen was black-and-white. It would be a compromise: you can’t encode as much information into the text’s appearance without access to color, but it could be sufficient depending on your requirements.
(Although technically this was actually syntax, not just syntax highlighting, since that's how the reference language distinguished between keywords and identically spelled identifiers.)
I’m thinking of old Visual Studio syntax highlighting where it primarily uses green and blue. Maybe pick one of those like E-ink panels can already do.
My $JOB is maintaining such a desktop CRUD app that's been in use for the past 20 years. It uses a Swing (via a proprietary higher-level framework) for its GUI. Over the years it's accreted a few dozen services (also in Java) in its orbit, but the central GUI app and its data-base still remain and continue to be extended as new requirements arise.
iCab was a favorite of mine before the switch from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X. I made heavy use of its ability to save offline copies of open web pages (with all embedded resources).
http://www.icab.de
Sometimes I'd like to see an alternate reality in which OpenDoc (and with it Cyberdog) really took off. I really liked the concept, but all the practical uses were really rough around the edges and somewhat slow, just like Cyberdog.
Yea, I used to do this with a little script. The strategy I used, which worked well when I was compressing and archiving workspaces (which might often contain checkouts of different branches of the same project) was essentially this:
This clusters file types together and within file types and within that files with the same base name close together.
This worked surprisingly well for my use cases, though you can imagine that packing and unpacking times were impacted by the additional head seeks caused by the rather arbitrary order in which this accesses files.
This will already sort equal file names together. If I wanted
to combine that with file sizes, I'd probably do some kind of
decorate | sort | undecorate
dance on each line produced by find. Where decorate would add the start of each line the things you want to sort by and undecorate would remove them again.
Yes, facebook is blocking the creation of new posts with links to Dreamwidth. Or at least, they did so when I attempted to create a post containing a link to the post under discussion here about 5 minutes ago. I am located in Austria if that makes any difference.
[1] https://maggieappleton.com/bidirectionals